A businesslike State of the Union address

Jobs, people, work, new, years, make. You can get a good sense of Obama’s State of the Union address purely from its most frequently used words. Yes, this one was all about the future, and – another popular word – “investing” in it. As the President himself put it, sounding like some freakish amalgam of David Cameron and Gordon Brown, “If we make the hard choices now to rein in our deficits, we can make the investments we need to win the future.”

The President wasn’t short of ideas for the investment half of that equation, even if – as others have noted – there was an absence of specifics. He clumsily evoked the space race (“this is our generation’s Sputnik moment”) when explaining why money should be channeled towards research and education. He added that taxpayers’ cash would be siphoned away from the oil companies, and used to fund clean, renewable energy sources.